I suddenly had an image of the wolf dressed up as Gramma telling Red Riding Hood, All the better to hear you with, my dear... come a little closer. I recoiled, and just in time. The revolver went off four times. The shots were loud where I was; they must have been deafening in the car. Four black eyes opened in the roof of Dolan’s Cadillac, and I felt something split the air an inch from my forehead.
“Did I get you, cocksucker?” Dolan asked.
“No,” I said.
The screamer had become the weeper. He was in the front seat. I saw his hands, as pale as the hands of a drowned man, slapping weakly at the windshield, and the slumped body next to him. Jimmy had to get him out, he was bleeding, the pain was bad, the pain was terrible, the pain was more than he could take, for the luvva Jaysus he was sorry, heartily sorry for his sins, but this was more than…
There was another pair of loud reports. The man in the front seat stopped screaming. The hands dropped away from the windshield.
“There,” Dolan said in a voice that was almost reflective. “He ain’t hurting any more and we can hear what we say to each other.”
I said nothing. I felt suddenly dazed and unreal. He had killed a man just now. Killed him. The feeling that I had underestimated him in spite of all my precautions and was lucky to be alive recurred.
“I want to make you a proposal,” Dolan said.
I continued to hold my peace.
“My friend?”
…and to hold it some more.
“Hey! You!” His voice trembled minutely. “If you’re still up there, talk to me! What can that hurt?”
“I’m here,” I said. “I was just thinking you fired six times. I was thinking you may wish you’d saved one for yourself before long. But maybe there’s eight in the clip, or you have reloads.”
Now it was his turn to fall silent. Then:
“What are you planning?”
“I think you’ve already guessed,” I said. “I have spent the last thirty-six hours digging the world’s longest grave, and now I’m going to bury you in your fucking Cadillac.”
The fear in his voice was still reined in. I wanted that rein to snap.
“You want to hear my proposition first?”
“I’ll listen. In a few seconds. First I have to get something.”
I walked back to the van and got my shovel.
When I got back he was saying “Robinson? Robinson? Robinson?” like a man speaking into a dead phone.
“I’m here,” I said. “You talk. I’ll listen. And when you’re finished I may make a counter-proposal.”
When he spoke, he sounded more cheerful. If I was talking counterproposals, I was talking deal. And if I was talking deal, he was already halfway to being out.
“I’m offering you a million dollars to let me out of here. But, just as important…”
I tossed a shovelful of gritty till down on the rear deck of the Cadillac. Pebbles bounced and rattled off the small rear window. Dirt sifted into the line of the trunk-lid.
“What are you doing?” His voice was sharp with alarm.
“Idle hands do the devil’s work,” I said. “I thought I’d keep mine busy while I listened.”
I dug into the dirt again and threw in another shovelful.
Now Dolan spoke faster, his voice more urgent.
“A million dollars and my personal guarantee that no one will ever touch you... not me, not my men, not anyone else’s men.”
My hands didn’t hurt any more. It was amazing. I shoveled steadily, and in no more than five minutes, the Cadillac’s rear deck was drifted deep in dirt. Putting it in, even by hand, was certainly easier than taking it out.
I paused, leaning on the shovel for a moment.
“Keep talking.”
“Look, this is crazy,” he said, and now I could hear bright splinters of panic in his voice. “I mean it’s just crazy.”
“You got that right,” I said, and shoveled in more dirt.
He held on longer than I thought any man could, talking, reasoning, cajoling – yet becoming more and more disjointed as the sand and dirt piled up over the rear window, repeating himself, backtracking, beginning to stutter. At one point the passenger door opened as far as it could and banged into the sidewall of the excavation. I saw a hand with black hair on the knuckles and a big ruby ring on the second finger. I sent down a quick four shovelfuls of loose earth into the opening. He screamed curses and yanked the door shut again.
He broke not long after. It was the sound of the dirt coming down that finally got to him, I think. Sure it was. The sound would have been very loud inside the Cadillac. The dirt and stones rattling onto the roof and falling past the window. He must have finally realized he was sitting in an upholstered eight-cylinder fuel-injected coffin.
“Get me out!” he shrieked. “Please! I can’t stand it! Get me out!”
“You ready for that counter-proposal?” I asked.
“Yes! Yes! Christ! Yes! Yes! Yes!”
“Scream. That’s the counter-proposal. That’s what I want. Scream for me. If you scream loud enough, I’ll let you out.”
He screamed piercingly.
“That was good!” I said, and I meant it. “But it was nowhere near good enough.”
I began to dig again, throwing fan after fan of dirt over the roof of the Cadillac. Disintegrating clods ran down the windshield and filled the windshield-wiper slot.
He screamed again, even louder, and I wondered if it was possible for a man to scream loud enough to rupture his own larynx.
“Not bad!” I said, redoubling my efforts. I was smiling in spite of my throbbing back. “You might get there, Dolan – you really might.”
“Five million.” It was the last coherent thing he said.
“I think not,” I replied, leaning on the shovel and wiping sweat off my forehead with the heel of one grimy hand. The dirt covered the roof of the car almost from side to side now. It looked like a starburst... or a large brown hand clasping Dolan’s Cadillac. “But if you can make a sound come out of your mouth which is as loud, let me say, as eight sticks of dynamite taped to the ignition switch of a 1968 Chevrolet, then I will get you out, and you may count on it.”
So he screamed, and I shoveled dirt down on the Cadillac. For some time he did indeed scream very loudly, although I judged he never screamed louder than two sticks of dynamite taped to the ignition switch of a 1968 Chevrolet. Three, at most. And by the time the last of the Cadillac’s brightwork was covered and I rested to look down at the dirt-shrouded hump in the hole, he was producing no more than a series of hoarse and broken grunts.
I looked at my watch. It was just past one o’clock. My hands were bleeding again, and the handle of the shovel was slippery. A sheaf of gritty sand flew into my face and I recoiled from it. A high wind in the desert makes a peculiarly unpleasant sound – a long, steady drone that simply goes on and on. It is like the voice of an idiot ghost.
I leaned over the hole. “Dolan?”
No answer.
“Scream, Dolan.”
No answer at first – then a series of harsh barks.
Satisfactory!
I went back to the van, started it up, and drove the mile and a half back down to the road construction. On the way I turned to WKXR, Las Vegas, the only station the van’s radio would pull in. Barry Manilow told me he wrote the songs that make the whole world sing, a statement I greeted with some skepticism, and then the weather report came on. High winds were forecast; a travellers’ advisory had been posted on the main roads between Vegas and the California line. There were apt to be visibility problems because of sheeting sand, the disc jockey said, but the thing to really watch out for was wind-shear. I knew what he was talking about, because I could feel it whipsawing the van.